E Randol Schoenberg

This lecture is for people interested in connecting to other families from their ancestral village. The recent development of specific town projects on Geni.com has opened up new avenues for collaborative genealogical research and tree-building. Combining the benefits of KehilaLinks, JewishGen FamilyFinder and the Geni family tree platform, town projects provide a useful way for genealogists to work together on genealogies and Jewish community histories related to a specific location. The lecture will discuss examples of large and small town projects, including Krakow, Frankfurt, San Francisco, and Prague. (For further examples, see http://www.geni.com/projects/Jewish-Genealogy-Portal-A-Guide-to-Jewish-Projects-and-Resources-on-Geni/13121.) Attendees will learn how to set up and organize their own town projects and invite collaborators. Specific attention will be given to the emerging view of generational family structure and interconnectedness in smaller Jewish communities, using well-documented examples based on 150 years of family records for the towns of Kolodeje, Bohemia and Kojetin, Moravia.